Excerpt from "On the Bottom" An Epic of Deep-Sea Diving In writing this book he has unconsciously revealed his own personality. We see him as a man of iron will, calmly facing difficulties that to many with equal technical knowledge would have seemed, and did in fact seem, insuperable, confronting every blow of fate with inflexible courage, remaining cheerful when most of those about him were thoroughly disheartened by successive misfor tunes, and finally, by sheer force of character, snatching victory from the very jaws of defeat. We see him, too, as a born leader of men, one of those rare souls who can inspire others with their own indomitable faith and courage, and spur the faint-hearted on to splendid deeds. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Imagine living in a box at the bottom of the sea for a month at a time. Locked away in a saturation chamber, plumbed to depths of more than 500 feet, this has been David Beckett's love, life, and work for all his adult life. Destined to become a pig farmer in the late 1960s, a twist of fate saw David become an air diver, and within a short space of time, he progressed to saturation diving. He would brush with death on more than one occasion - not least when helping to recover 47 bodies of the victims of the Sumburgh chinook disaster in Scotland's Shetland Islands - and when called in to assist with the deadliest peacetime shipwreck in Europe, as the MS Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994 and claimed 852 lives. Amongst the depths of despair, there are many lighter moments, including treasure hunting in the Philippines, almost clinching a contract to salvage the bursar's safe from the Titanic, and surviving a 24-hour typhoon that brought 80-foot waves crashing down on his boat. The Loonliness of a Deep Sea Diver is gritty, sometimes comical, and offers a unique glimpse into a life at sea, much of it at the bottom.